Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Filling prisons is killing families

By Mouser the King CatKarol Markowicz is a gem of a columnist who writes once a
week for the New York Post. She recently took on a topic that seems to get only
small amounts of traction here and there – what to do about our out-of-control
criminal justice system:

In the last
40 years, America’s prison population has spiked. One in 31 Americans is either
in jail or on probation or parole. According to a special report by the Bureau
of Justice [Statistics] in 2014, which tracked the release of over 400,000
prisoners in 30 states, over 75% were arrested again within five years of
getting out. It’s easy to shrug … but as the prisoner count continues to spiral
ever upward, it becomes more likely that someone you care about will become
ensnared in the broken system.

Parts of the
column are personal. Born in the U.S.S.R. and raised in Brooklyn, Ms. Markowicz
recalls seeing friends and neighbors being carted off the prison for selling
marijuana and stock fraud. (Those were the good old days before all stocks
basically became a fraud.) She also tells the story of a father of two young
children convicted in federal court of insurance fraud, likely facing a 20-year
term. Her conclusion:

While the
argument that mass incarceration [has] led to a safer country can’t be
discounted, we also shouldn’t discount the societal price, especially the
breakdown of families across so many communities. We can change the criminal
justice system now or we can wait until even more people are crushed by it. But
change it we must.

My theory: Few
want to take this large issue head on. Jailing-for-profit outrages are swept
under the rug by compliant media. Activists citing disproportionate numbers of
minorities in prison often drift into shrill rhetoric that is easy to ignore.